Work that reached these organizations and many more
Employees forget 90% of traditional training within a month. The problem isn't your content. It's that nobody made it fun. I fix that.
I've spent 20 years making things fun: games, VR experiences, themed attractions, and enterprise training. I named League of Legends. I built Jurassic World VR. I deployed a controller-free VR haunted house to 30+ countries that won USA Today's Best Theme Park Halloween Event. And I led experience design at an enterprise XR studio later acquired by Cornerstone OnDemand, building the workflow and modular template system from scratch that became their immersive learning platform.
The common thread across all of it: I know how to make things fun. Not as intuition. As a repeatable, documented process. That process is Blueprint for Fun. And it's the reason the training I design doesn't just get completed. It gets replayed.
Former teacher. CES Innovation in Gaming Award winner (St. Noire, 2020). Walt Disney Imagineering. Los Angeles, CA.
The technology works. The retention numbers are real. But 80% of immersive training programs still fail to deliver. The people building them don't know how to make them fun.
The brief was simple: build a VR app to teach cold-calling scripts to customer service reps. The script was long. Nobody was reading it. But when I interviewed frontline managers and the reps themselves, that wasn't the real problem.
The real problem was turnover. New hires were quitting because they spent their first weeks absorbing nothing but angry customers who didn't want to be cold-called. They weren't prepared emotionally. The script was the symptom. Burnout was the disease.
Instead of building a script memorization app, I designed an experience that desensitized reps to hostile customers. Made it a game, made it fun, made it challenging in a way that felt like play. The script was woven into the mechanics. You couldn't win without learning it. But learning it wasn't the point. Surviving the customer was.
The previous training app had engagement rates in the gutter. This one, employees used on their own time. Turnover improved. The design was so well-received internally that a single project turned into five contracts across five business units. 50,000 learners total. The platform I built the template for was later acquired by Cornerstone OnDemand, one of the largest corporate learning platforms in the world.
Three conversations from the Harbinger of Fun podcast. A game design professor. Accenture's head of learning R&D. The founder of Atari. All landed in the same place.
Harbinger of Fun Podcast · Bob Gerard, Director of Learning Ingenuity, Accenture
"We work on making learning fun. You're bringing the fun to learning and I'm bringing the learning to fun. We'll meet in the middle."
"Making learning fun is probably the hardest thing to do in design."
"It is. It's challenging, yeah."
Harbinger of Fun Podcast · Jesse Schell, Carnegie Mellon University · Author, The Art of Game Design
"When people feel like they're the ones making the discovery, they own it. When you just tell them the fact, you took away their ability to discover it for themselves."
"I'm writing a book called Blueprint for Fun. Four steps on how to make a product fun. The last step is discovery specifically."
"That makes sense."
Harbinger of Fun Podcast · Nolan Bushnell, Founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese
"I spent the last 12 years specifically trying to answer the question of what makes something fun. The very end of it is learning. It's tension cut by discovery. And when I got to that conclusion, I was upset because school is supposed to be all about learning and it wasn't fun at all."
"Joe is actually a bit of a savant. He sounds like a podcast interviewer here, but he actually has some serious technical chops."
The business case for making training fun is overwhelming. The problem is almost nobody knows how to actually do it.
The caveat: 80% of gamification programs still fall short. Organizations use surface-level mechanics (badges, leaderboards) without designing for the behavioral outcomes underneath. That's the design problem I solve.
You've already invested in XR or you're about to. Let's make sure that investment actually works. Fun is what separates the 20% of XR training that sticks from the 80% that doesn't.
I evaluate your existing or in-development XR training experience through the lens of the Blueprint for Fun framework. You get a clear diagnosis of why engagement is low, what's broken in the experience design, and a prioritized roadmap to fix it. Before you spend more building the wrong thing.
I design the complete experience architecture for your XR training: the emotional flow, game mechanics, tension points, reward systems, and learning integration. This is the blueprint your dev team executes. Built on Blueprint for Fun, it's the reason the finished product will actually work.
I embed as your ongoing creative authority for XR training: reviewing builds, guiding decisions, and making sure the experience never drifts into tech demo territory. The person in the room who asks "but is it fun?" every single week, and knows exactly what to do when the answer is no.
Fun isn't a feeling. It's a structure. Every experience that makes people want to keep going. From League of Legends to a VR training module that employees actually replay runs on the same four mechanics.
The definitive framework for making any experience: training, game, product, or activation genuinely fun. Not gamified. Not "engaging." Fun. There's a difference, and this book explains exactly what it is.
One conversation is enough to know if I can help. No pitch deck required. Just tell me what you are building.